Forget New York, when it comes to pension bankruptcy, we're at the top of the heap

New Jersey will be the among the first states to have its public pension funds go broke, according to analyst Josh Rauh.

"Under my projections, seven states run out of money before 2020, including Louisiana (2017), Illinois (2018), New Jersey (2018), and Connecticut (2018)," he writes.

Raising taxes is out of the question here. Property taxes have already gone through the roof, partly to pay for the outrageous pensions already being collected by public employees who retire as much as 20 years earlier than the people who pay their salaries.

The only solution I see is the one that applies in private industry: The plan gets frozen and its assets are divvied up equitably. Employees switch to the same sort of 401-k plan that those of us in the real world have.

And before someone starts whining about how 401-k plans fluctuate with the stock market, let me say this: So do pension funds. The difference is public employees expect the taxpayers to make up the difference.

Who's to blame for this mess? As always in Trenton, the Republicans bear just as much blame as the Democrats. Here's an excerpt from a column I wrote just after Jim McGreevey took office in 2002. The Republican leaders had just called a press conference to denounce his budgetary practices. I listed some atrocities committed by the GOP majority when Christie Whitman was in power and added this:

Then there was that 9 percent hike in public employee pensions five months before the 2001 election. It was an obvious bid to buy votes, but the giveaway came after the state's pension fund had already begun its swan dive in the stock market. The pension costs are up; the market's down. Thank the GOP.

I wrote that eight years ago. It was obvious even then that public employees could not keep receiving defined-benefit pensions. Private industry was already abandoning the practice.

To this day, however, I can't think of a single elected official in Trenton who will state publicly that defined-benefit pensions for public employees have to end.